


frozen fire in the burned up stratosphere

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 6x01 Tag, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Everyone figuring their shit out, F/M, Post Season 5, Season 6 Speculation, Smut, with a dose of healthy conversation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 09:07:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15905193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: "She watches him through the glass of the cryo-chamber, ice edging inwards to his face like on puddles on the road after a January rainfall in England, creeping in towards their center.An hour, Enoch said, it would take an hour for him to come out of it."





	frozen fire in the burned up stratosphere

She watches him through the glass of the cryo-chamber, ice edging inwards to his face like on puddles on the road after a January rainfall in England, creeping in towards their center. 

An hour, Enoch said, it would take an hour for him to come out of it.

Simmons worries about the rate of tissue decay in the brain, about the aggravation this could put on his injury, and about what she’s going to say when he wakes up. 

She watches the ice recede, then the front panel of the chamber releases and his eyes open. 

“Fitz,” she breathes, under a cascade of relief. His eyes meet hers, clear and full of icy blue confusion, then the rest of the team swarms in. 

“Hey Turbo.” Mack has a hand on his shoulder, there might be tears in his eyes. 

Daisy rushes in and actually hugs him, her arms looping tight around his shoulders. Fitz holds Jemma’s hand, a million questions on his face, and pats Daisy on the back with his other arm. 

“What’s happened?” He looks to Mack, then Yo-Yo, to the side of Daisy’s head, then back to Simmons. 

Daisy laughs, wetly, as she pulls away. “It’s kind of a long story.”

 

Silence draws in to them. Fitz stares down at the standard issue grey sheets. Simmons stares at Fitz, watching him processing her stuttered explanation of the past few months. It’s a lot to take in. He did die after all. 

“Why don’t I make us some tea or-“

“Simmons.” His voice is rough, calloused like the tips of his fingers, and it drives her similarly mad. 

“Yes?” Too high, too breathy. She tries to pull the air from her voice and keep it in her lungs but she can’t. The hand that was twisting in the knit throw his mother had sent them catches her wrist. His ring finger falls on her pulse point, thumb and forefinger closing just above the bone. 

Except it’s not one bone, there are eight carpal bones, two sets of four, and a mnemonic. Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can’t Handle. Positions for P for pisiform is the one that presses visible through the skin. 

“Fitz?” she tries again, achieving something more similar to her normal tone. 

“I just-“ His fingers chase the veins up her arm to her elbow and even in his hesitance, it lights her skin on fire. “Can I?”

“Yes,” she says, too quickly, then: “I mean, I-“

He chuckles, a rumble in his chest that makes something low in her stomach twist. He leans in like he’s going to kiss her. “It’s been a while for me too.”

Then he does kiss her. And she’s finally home.

 

“Does this mean you’re older now?”

She laughs, just on her breath and shakes her head. That had always been a sticking point between them, in the early days at the Academy. Fitz’s insistence at his own maturity and her rebuttal that twenty-three days is not enough to treat her as a younger sister. She’s never been more glad he got over that. 

“I think the time we spent in space averages out to the same as the time that passed on Earth while we were gone.”

He nudges her back on the narrow bed, so she’s laying propped on a flat pillow and he’s hovering over her. She wants to tell him to take it easy, but the arm that holds him up doesn’t waver. He ducks his head and plants messy kisses on her throat, down her collarbones and into the scoop neck of her t-shirt. 

“But what about,” he asks between kisses, his voice gone light, almost teasing, “The ice chamber? Because technically I haven’t been aging, or at least the rate of aging has been severely decreased for-“ He stops and looks up at her. A furrow between his eyebrows, a new concern he’d not yet realized. 

“How long?”

She swallows the emotion in her throat. “Three months.”

“Jemma,” he whispers, pained, and darts in to kiss her temple. He lingers there, breath catching in the thin hairs and she wraps her arm around his waist, her open palm pressing into his lower back, and tugs. 

He loses his balance and falls into her with a grunt that punches a bit of air from her lungs. It’s worth the weight of him, the feeling of his hip bone digging into her stomach and the assurance that he’s real beneath her fingertips. That he’s skin and flesh and Fitz, not an illusion of her subconscious mind trying to bring her comfort. 

He smells like Fitz, like oil grease and sweat, like milk in tea and electrical smoke, with just a hint of something else, something sharper, like metal in an ice rink.

“Jemma.” He wriggles like he’s going to move away so she locks her other arm around his waist too. 

“Just-“ She gasps, her throat suddenly burning, tears in her eyes all at once. 

“Okay.” He kisses her temple again, then the side of her face by her ear, then down the side of her jaw. Once he reaches her lips she feels like she can breathe again. 

 

Then it’s not enough. She needs to feel him closer, to assure herself he’s real. She needs to feel his heart beating, against her skin, inside her bones. 

She pulls up the hem of his shirt and breaks the kiss only to yank it over his head. Then, she drags his mouth back down to hers with one hand buried in his hair. 

“Jemma,” he hisses as she drags her nails down his chest. He’s both bonier, and more filled out than he was before. She remembers that about the last Fitz she met in space too. He’d told her that he’d created an exercise regime to stay sane in prison but that the food had been terrible. 

But a different Fitz had said those words to her, one that’s gone now. She bites into his bottom lip hard enough to hurt and his hands tighten on her ribs, then start working her shirt up and it’s exactly what she needs. To forget all the heartache and suffering they’ve gone through, to just be with him. 

His hand around the curve of her breast and the press of him, hard through his trousers, against her hip washes away her fears. That he’d be different, that she’d really lose him forever. Relief chokes up her throat. Wetness gathers in the corners of her eyes as she tries to breathe around it. She squeezes her eyes shut tight, until stars burst in the blackness of her vision, and draws his lips down for a bruising kiss. 

In the darkness every nerve ending bursts brighter and feels sharper. She can feel them almost individually as Fitz brushes down her ribs and works the button open on her jeans. She helps him kick them down her legs, taking her underwear with them, then discard his own trousers. 

He traces around her cunt with a light touch that she can’t stand. Her hips shift impatiently and a whine builds in her throat. He gets the message, dipping a finger into her wet heat. It only grows the ache between her thighs and behind her heart. 

“Jemma,” he whispers, reverent, and her eyes flutter open. A salty tear slips free, despite her best effort to keep it contained, and he kisses it away off the apple of her cheek. 

She grips onto the curve of his shoulder hard enough that her nails bite into the skin, sure to leave impressions. Four marks on his back that she wants to dig deeper, to prove that he’s flesh and blood. That he’s malleable, not a statue above her, carved free from stone. His heart pounds and she watches the flutter of his pulse in his neck. 

“Fitz,” she gasps, on the edge of tears, as he strokes a second finger inside of her and his thumb draws a circle on her clit. “Please, just-“ She reaches out. Her fingers glance off his hip, wrap around the silky skin of his cock and stroke. 

“Yeah, yeah.” His fingers pull out replace hers, guiding on his cock, and his other hand cups her cheek, forces their eyes to meet. His heart spills up out of his gaze. 

He sinks into her. 

 

He sags against the curved wall of the plane, looking for the first time since her woke like the weeks and months of stress that had been set upon him. Sweat sticks her back to his chest. She turns and presses a gentle kiss to his shoulder. 

“Get some rest.” She whispers. Her body hums with satisfaction but she can’t quite sink into the lull of sleep that’s testing at the edges of her consciousness. 

“You too,” he mumbles, his fingers flexing at her waist, a sure sign that he’s about to pass out. She kisses him again and his eyes flutter shut. 

His body slumps, his head rolls back, dead weight in sleep, and she puts one palm on his chest, over his heart. She can just barely feel the beating through the skin. Under her fingertips she can feel the rate slipping, from the tumble of exertion to its slower, resting state and it almost fades away. 

Anxiety whispers around the corners of her own heart and she brings her hand up to his throat. Two fingers slip over the skin under his jaw, back towards his ear, until she lands on his carotid. The beating continues there, slow and steady, and his lips twitch in sleep.  
She counts to one hundred with the beat of his heart, then halfway there again before she can bring herself to retract her hand. 

 

Once he’s snoring gently she gets up from the bed. Silently, in the darkness, she dresses because she can’t sit there any longer. It’s too similar, to how she watched his corpse – brought back to the Zephyr in the gentle clutch of Mack’s arms – to how she watched this-him defrost. Despite the pulse sure and steady through his veins, suffocation creeps into her throat. 

In the hallway, everything but the tinted emergency lights are off in the simulation of night. Simmons follows the green glow strips on the floor towards the cockpit. Everything is quiet, the engines hardly so much as hum, even in the bunks, in the belly of the plane. 

There’s a kind of claustrophobia to be found in the thin hallways and narrow corridors of the Zephyr now that it’s left the Earth behind. Everything feels more closed in, every space a tighter fit than before. She knows it’s illogical. The plane is exactly the same as it’s always been. But her subconscious fear can’t help but feel like the vacuum of space presses in tighter than Earth’s atmosphere ever could, and that the metal hull has shrunk beneath the pressure. 

She climbs the set of stairs. 

More light glows from the cockpit. Even though their course is set and the controls need no observation she can see the shadow of a figure sitting there. Jemma goes to join her.

“Fitz is getting some rest,” she explains needlessly. “I didn’t want to disturb him.”

“I’m sure.” Daisy has half a smirk on her lips, like she knows, and heat crawls up the back of Jemma’s neck. The fractures splintered over their team are still healing and while once it would have been common place to talk to Daisy about sex, Jemma can’t help her blush. She sits in the co-pilots seat and they both stare into the inky black space between the stars. 

“I don’t blame him you know.” Daisy says suddenly. Jemma turns to look at her but Daisy’s eyes are locked on their forward course. On the sky where there’s no horizon to be found.

“Pardon?”

“This Fitz, I don’t-“ she sighs inwards, then out. “I know I said things, back at the Lighthouse. That after everything I’d never forgive him.” Daisy nods to the stars. “But I want you to know that I don’t blame this Fitz for the things that the other Fitz did. To me, to the team.”

She finally looks at Jemma and the belief in her eyes is plainly obvious. 

“He’s suffered enough.”

“He has,” Jemma agrees quietly. There are tears in her throat again. She’s cried more in the last ten hours than she did in the previous six months. More than she has since Mack found her in the med-bay with a look of utter devastation and she’d _known._

“So whatever you’ve told him or you haven’t told him, we’re good. It’s not going to be an issue.”

Jemma nods and swallows the lump in her throat. “And are we good? You and I?”

Unlike with Fitz there’s been no reset between them. Jemma has still made her choices, has still disobeyed the orders Daisy gave. 

“Shit, Simmons, yeah.” Daisy reaches across the console and takes her hand. “You-“ she struggles for words for a moment. “You were just doing what you could. It got _crazy_ there for a minute, I don’t know if you noticed. Like, actually properly fucked, beyond flaming heads and parasite demons that bring back the dead. That was some serious shit. Between Fitz and Coulson and Yo-Yo,” she sighs, her voice trailing. “We all lost our heads.”

“But,” Daisy says again with conviction, “We were also all just doing what we thought needed to be done. I- I have to forgive that. To move forward.”

Simmons blinks away her tears. “I suppose forward really is the only way to go now, we’ve already done back.”

 

They sit there for a long while. Until the lights start to rise and simulated day begins. There’s still nothing but stars and darkness beyond the cockpit. 

Daisy rises first, stretching from her spine like a cat. A yawn cracks over her jaw and she covers her mouth with her wrist. 

“Night, Simmons.” She touches Jemma’s shoulder as she passes. 

“Daisy?” Jemma stops her. 

“Yeah?”

They’re frozen between moments, not quite looking at each other, caught in a vacuum. 

“Thank you.” Simmons says quietly. 

“For what?” 

She can hear Daisy turn, to no doubt restart their conversation so Jemma shakes her head to keep her where she is. She keeps staring through the tempered glass. 

“For finding him.”

“You did all the hard science-y bits.” Daisy sounds confused. Jemma gets up from her own seat and finds Daisy standing there, her head cocked and her eyebrows furrowed. She walks past her back to the bunks and squeezes her arm as she passes.

“Goodnight, Daisy. Sweet dreams.”

**Author's Note:**

> This kinda ties in with my other season 6 (ish) fic 'the curvature of our history' if you're interested. They kinda occur simultaneously. Or at least in the same universe. Also, I never write smut so I'm sorry if this is terrible. Let me know what you think and if you want to find me on tumblr I'm @sinkingsidewalks


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